“There is ONE medium.”

There has been a lot of buzz on web versus printwith Clay Shirky (Shoutout to Temporaryversion) discussing the business implications of old models struggling to deal with new ones. (Here’s an example by Shirky on why newspapers cannot adopt a iTunes-like model). I see one of the key challenges as culture, in that (North)American culture is one of what I call “quick cuts and remix.” You see this in talk of convergence culture and Jenkins’s book, which describes instances of the modalitiesand materialities (Pfeiffer) of media combining. We see in our everyday lives the Internet is taking over TV viewing time and also offering up viewing of broadcast TV/radio shows. We can read books online or on handheld devices like Kindle hooked to databases. Advertising and product placement are becoming more and more ubiquitous, so that this will be not so far-fetched. [ThickCulture is brought to you by Contexts. Cutting-edge content provided free of charge by the American Sociological Association]

We “scan” and read “at” things. If we (or our attention spans) are pinched for time, we get information by reading the Yahoo headlines, not the article. We are promiscuous in our media habits and don’t want to pay for things we don’t feel we should pay for.

“An analysis of art in the age of mechanical reproduction must do justice to these relationships, for they lead us to an all-important insight: for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the “authentic” print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics.”

Two things. I think that content isn’t emancipated from ritual, but rather that new rituals and culturally-driven patterns of praxis (i.e., drivers of meaning) are created, often in unpredictable ways. Media content can now be taken and repurposed. The mashup is a perfect example, along with user-driven meanings in Web 2.0. The reference to politics as a basis is a nod to Benjamin’s Marxism. I believe that media content and art now are squarely in the realm, not of politics, but of the political economy, specifically in terms of inter/actions in markets.

Roger Chartier in The Order of Books notes that in studying print capitalism, in order to understand it within a cultural context, we need to address (1) the text (content), (2) the book (media), and (3) reading practices. There has been a lot of attention on the first two, but less solid understanding on the reading of media. What Jenkins teaches us through his thick description of the current media milieu is that the lines between media are blurring. We see it in the modes and materialities, but also in the economics. I feel we are moving towards a singularity of media. For example, some will say print and broadcast TV are both dead, as both will soon be killed by the web. That’s the wrong way of thinking. This assumes a linearity akin to upshifting a manual transmission.

"Valentine: Lindsay's Adventures in Wonderland" (2007) --14

In terms of media praxis, success will often be about creating models of how media can be intertwined to create value. Take any pop culture figure, such as Lindsay Lohan. She’s in film, she’s a singer, a celebrity newsmaker and tabloid fodder, and the butt of the satirists’ joke (see left). The Internet is moving towards collapsing all paths to Lindsay into a single LindsayÜberstraße, a vertitable autobahn of linked Web 2.0 content.

I think it is telling that the Journalism School at CUNY, which is earning a reputation for being on the leading edge, is no longer requiring students to commit to a media track. Additionally, with integrated market communications (IMC), there will be increasing market-based pressures to view media as one. A future post will grapple with the Deleuzean idea of singularity and how it applies to media. I think we need to address how people are “reading” all media in this Web 2.0 age. Why? We finally might get a handle on figuring out how the new technologies will specifically transform culture, economics, and society.

Is print dead? What about the demise of the Fourth estate, perhaps a linchpin of democracy? Well, someone else said this, not me, but I’m more interested in good journalism than newspapers. The problem is that newspapers and the news media are often tied to economic imperatives, which is (in my opinion) a historical trajectory that is by no means set. We need to think about content in the age of infinite replication, which makes Benjamin such an important figure.

My friend Mimi Zeiger at Loudpaper blogged about the state of print. I think it’s important to think about the implications of the functions of journalism and publishing and how these will be manifested, as media goes singular. I personally feel a certain fondness for actual printed work. It may have more to do with the specific æsthetics of the medium than anything and possibly the tactile experience.

Do you think it’s useful to think of media as singular?

What is the future of print?

For those who feel they have something important to say, I’ll leave you with the following, a portrait of Miranda July.

Comments

re: singularity, I am feeling like different models surge and synthesize what is going on in this internet age.

right now I feel like lots of people I know are abandoning their blogs to tweet and then post those tweets and delicious links on FB. so your friends and acquaintances become your ersatz editorial filter. which, when I write it, sounds super old school, almost 19th century. so, to create an interesting mix of content you have to curate your social network. (kinda like CUNY keeping things lively.)

btw, here’s a link to the guys behind the poster in the miranda july painting. print liberation. totally cool fellows. I just interviewed them for a piece on social design for cmyk.

yea, the web (whether it will or will not be our only media medium) takes us to a place of reproducibility unimagined by walter, doesn’t it? the paper that (inauthentic, de-ritualized) photograph or film reel is printed on is reproducible and this changed everything, it was the moment (to paraphrase derrida) when art became FULLY discourse — but i’m thinking that the web really changes the meaning of reproducibility — in fact, rather than being in the age of (industrial) mechanical reproduction, are we in a new age altogether in terms of the questions he was asking…? art/media in the age of virtuality (which cannot be like the staid, static, corporeal “reproduction” which still had a body, an “inauthentic” body san ritual but a body nonetheless… which is something wigging me out in process of transforming my music from cd’s to digitalia! :-)) is art/media in a whole new era…

and then this is complicated by your issue of an impending web singularity, which i suppose mirrors the transition to print culture (which i guess was a new singularity in comparison with previous forms, particularly as regards poetry and other literatures), which is both scary (politically) and exciting (politically) just as it is both scary and exciting in terms of the question of reading practices: there is a strange trade-off between the revolutionary, freeing potential of easy, wide access to information, knowledge, art, literature (…all of shakespeare is on gutenberg.org, available to anyone who has access to the web, and on top of that, various and sundry unpackings of shakespeare, all of him, are likewise there, for perusal and the art object is thus both made inauthentic and at the same time available to every single individual who can use a computer and access the web) AND the ways by which a single medium, and in particular THIS single medium (as opposed, say, to oral storytelling) impacts how we read… or even IF we read: if we actually read something, fully, or if we merely skim, or merely breeze thru and pick up highlights, or if we only look at the pretty, sexy pictures and the headline and move on…

I thinkit’s useful to think of the media as singular. Being able to find all different kind of things online extremely useful and informative. The whole “scanning” thing and reading “at” things reminds me of the “Is Google Making Us Dumb” article. With people’s attention spans getting shorter and needing more to-the-point media, the internet is perfect. The way things are going everyone can access just about all they need. The future of print however, looks grim. Definitely not a bad thing as it will be hepful to our environment, but it will also allow ideas to spread faster than they already are.

I think you summarize it well when you say the lines between media are blurring or talk about convergence. Blog posts are a good example of this. While they tend to have certain formatting and conventions, the posts in this blog incorporate elements of several mediums. Images, video, podcasts, blog writing, academic and news articles, etc. Different mediums do affect reading practices. For example, reading the same passage in a book and online are not always the same thing due to context if nothing else). The internet is largely unrestricted by format (at least in comparison to graphic art, print, etc.), allowing it to encompass a broad range of content previously associated with a specific format (e.g. newspapers).

I think e-readers such as the Kindle may be forerunners of a hybridization of digital and printed text. Or, more technically, delivering digital text in a way that emulates or even improves on much of the form and ritual of print, but without many of print’s limitations.

Uni-platform ?? Media and the print are all interrelated and as stated in the post they gather information from various “mediums” and build off of them. The future I think is headed towards a decentralized format enabling the usage of all mediums. Like ryan stated, the incorporation of video, papers ect. is apparent in bloggers. In the future i see the lines blurring among what used to be diverse “schools” of communication, the media is becoming a conglomeration of all types of communication.
Print is going to continue to diminish, as technology increases the online availability of books, poetry, news, opinion, networking ect. I do not see print becoming “extinct” any time soon but it is going to occur in the future.
I personally would rather cough up $200 on a book then read it online. Online does not offer a kinetic relationship with material. I learn by writing, seeing and experiencing. If I am reading online it does not “stick” because of my learning style and my reluctance to stare at a computer screen for hours upon hours aside from our time spent on the computer living our “online lives” and working on hmk assignments.

I find myself thinking about this idea recently. I was passing a Barnes and Noble and realized that their books are incredibly over-priced and I thought about the long tail and how everything is now available for a lower price online. Places like Amazon and half.com sell used books for low prices and they don’t have to lease a building to fit thousands of books. Also, newspaper articles are available for free online. This makes me question how is it that people are still paying for newspapers when they are free online? I find it more efficient to google an article rather than go out and buy the paper and flip the pages searching for an article.
I see that printing may become something of the past soon because both my “Internet & Politics” and Economics courses require online text. Perhaps in the future, on the contrary as to how Jennifer feels about text on paper and online, students will find it normal to read from a computer screen rather than a textbook.

I think print media is dead it was unable to realize the affect of the web before it was too late. Print media censors itself more due to political repercussions if they say the wrong thing about the wrong politician or powerful person. Newspapers are dying but television can be saved due to the fact that they are trying to integrate the web into more aspects of that industry they realize people are spending more time online then watching television so people now have the options to watch their favorite shows online. Print media is sinking who knows if they can save themselves from falling, to do so they are going to have to become more internet friendly.

Sadly the era of sitting down on a Saturday morning with a cup of coffee and the newspaper is coming to a sure and definite close. Society sees this form of Americana an inconvenience, and is replacing it with Saturday mornings of web surfing and rapid-fire blogging. Attention spans have decreased to the point where it becomes more efficient to scan 30 blogs and online articles in 20 minutes than an hour of reading the Times and Wall Street Journal front to back. How has efficiency overruled meticulousness? Because I can cover the important headlines on Yahoo while checking my e-mail and checking the box scores I have somehow accomplished something greater? The ability to spread ideas at a quicker rate means nothing if those ideas are based on “spark notes” research.

If given the choice, I would much rather read a newspaper the old fashioned way than get my news on a computer screen or dictated to me through the television. This most likely has to do with the fact that I have no television and newspapers are freely distributed around CLU. I agree with Professor Kambara when he said, “I personally feel a certain fondness for actual printed work. It may have more to do with the specific æsthetics of the medium than anything and possibly the tactile experience.” However, it is true that I do not read every article word for word. Even with a paper in front of me I skim articles and sometimes only read headlines. Is that due to the state of media and our ever-shrinking attention spans? Probably. Is it a bad thing? Not in my opinion. The future of print might be completely printless in the future, but I don’t think that will happen in my lifetime. I grew up reading books (yes whole books, gasp) and taking literature classes that required substantial struggle with texts. However, I was recently baby-sitting and it did not seem to me that the habits of newer generations follow this exact suit. They have more access to a variety of media and I remember one saying they could no longer get one of their favorite girl magazines anywhere but online. In addition, one girl in my econ class did not buy her textbook but rather bought a downloadable version. This saved her lots of money, but I would feel that I am not getting as much out of a book without holding it and writing in the margins. However, those days may very well be over.

I do believe print is dieing in America. There might be some intrinsic value in reading a news paper, but a virtual newspaper is capable of telling you the exact same information. times are changing and so will the brain. I see the virtual text just as the next step in our movement towards a digital society. Technology has advanced to levels that change how information in learned. Maybe someday it will look like this… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_uzEj71AU4

I believe the ability to digitally take and create the media in which we are presented makes in more valuable and gives the individual more power. This is dangerous in some cases but can at the same time greatly benefits a society that seeks individualism.

When it comes down to it how does the information change? Reading a story in print or online doesn’t make the story any less important or give it a different meaning. We are now in the a digital society and print is having a hard time keeping up with that. Weather the New York times delivers the paper to my front door or to my email account, the stories are the same and the writing is the same, so why not have a paper you can access anywhere? I guess it just comes down to preference in what you would rather read, but the overwhelming preference has become digital causing papers across the country to go under because there demand is no longer needed.

The future of print is in magazines. Magazines already function like a blog; short, to te point, and with lots of pictures. They allow for physical print in such areas where you cannot have computers for everyone, such as waiting rooms. Other then magazines I do not see a big future for print, the digital revolution is taking over!

[…] story on how the award winning Daily Bruin sold a “wrapper ad” made me think about the singularity of media and the future of print. The PBS Frontline of The Persuaders shows how JetBlue used a similar wrapper ad in Boston to […]

[…] Should we get over it? Are we degenerating into a culture of optics? We can say that issues of values and character matter, but are we just setting up a situation where only the squeaky clean can withstand the scrutiny in media singularity. […]

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